Tom Hanks’ daughter, E.A. Hanks, is opening up about her harrowing childhood in a new memoir.
E.A. (whose initials stand for Elizabeth Anne) was born in May 1982 — joining big brother Colin Hanks, who was born five years earlier in November 1977. The Hanks family, at the time, was made up of Tom and his then-wife Susan Dillingham (stage name Samantha Lewes) and the kids.
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When the couple divorced in 1985, E.A., now 42, and Colin, now 47, moved with their mother to Sacramento — a 6-hour drive from Los Angeles, where the family had been living.
“My dad came to pick us up from school and we’re not there,” E.A. revealed. “And it turns out we haven’t been there for two weeks and he has to track us down.”
It was her childhood in Sacramento, with Dillingham, that soon became unbearable for her.
“I would visit my dad and stepmother [Rita Wilson] (and soon enough my younger half brothers [Truman and Chet Hanks]) on the weekends and during summers, but from 5 to 14, years filled with confusion, violence, deprivation, and love, I was a Sacramento girl,” E.A. wrote in her upcoming memoir, The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road, according to an excerpt from People.
Though her mother — who died from lung cancer in 2002 at age 49 — never received an official diagnosis, E.A. believes Dillingham was “bipolar with episodes of extreme paranoia and delusion,” People reported.
“As the years went on,” E.A. penned, “the backyard became so full of dog s*** that you couldn’t walk around it, the house stank of smoke. The fridge was bare or full of expired food more often than not, and my mother spent more and more time in her big four-poster bed, poring over the Bible.”
E.A. recalled a specific incident of abuse that changed her parents’ custody agreement.
“One night, her emotional violence became physical violence, and in the aftermath I moved to Los Angeles, right smack in the middle of the seventh grade,” the author wrote. “My custody arrangement basically switched — now I lived in L.A. and visited Sacramento on the weekends and in the summer.”
E.A.’s memoir — which comes out April 8 — recounts her 2019 roadtrip from L.A. to Florida, during which she sought out answers and learned secrets of her late mother’s past.
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